Yahoo! Shammi Kapoor and the corporeal stylistics of popular Hindi cinema

Abstract

The article argues that Shammi Kapoor (1931–2011) revolutionized and forever altered the corporeal stylistic of popular Hindi cinema by breaking away from the soft masculinity of the golden era films. Whereas the golden era films, which were predominantly films of social criticism, put stress on the body as the repository of socio-political values and ethico-economic concerns, Kapoor's dancehall dramas ushered in a new aesthetics of the masculine body in which blood life – i.e. life as an expressive and a-causal principle of vitality – exceeds all socio-political frames and references. By virtue of this innovation, Kapoor altered the manner of performing the masculine in popular Hindi cinema and influenced a whole cadre of male heroes who followed in his wake.

Notes

 1. The phrase ‘corporeal stylistics’ refers to the artful manipulation of the human body for the purpose of spectacle, pleasure, critique, instruction and narrative. The ensemble of the body – that is the vocal, ocular, gestural, sartorial and muscular components that make up its unity – is fundamental to the cinematic production of social, ethical, aesthetic, libidinal and even economic values. The body-in-performance generates value because it is the bearer of meaningful marks that may be deciphered and understood. The significance of somatic or anatomical marks depends enormously, of course, on the context of reception. It is, for instance, possible to imagine the Indian nod being completely misconstrued by an audience made up of non-Indians. Whatever the culture or context, the body is a site where expressive marks turn into value of one type or another. How we read comic or malign figures, evaluate spiritual worth or moral turpitude, yield to cathartic laughter or despair, interpret states of privilege or penury and grasp amorous destiny or gendered oppression depends fundamentally on the successful harnessing of corporeal expressivity. We know that stock figures of villainy, for instance, are more likely to don dark clothing, betray their inner malice in behavioural idiosyncrasies (sidelong glances or twitching eyes) and expose their tarnished souls in addictive practices and recurrent habits. Cecil B. De Mille, for instance, turned the chain-smoker into an archetype of moral depravity. More recently, Ridley Scott, director of Blade Runner (1982), discovered in the origami enthusiast the potential for incalculable menace and augury.

 2. For an extended discussion of this dynamic, see Mishra (2009, 315–44).

 3. In B.R. Chopra's Naya Daur (The new way, 1957), Krishna's sexuality does not so much represent a biological impulse as its socio-political distortion. Coveting the village belle, and jealous of his friend, Shankar, who stands between him and the voluptuous Rajni, he turns turncoat with the result that he forfeits his ethical and social place in the community. Manipulated by the forces of ruthless capitalism, Krishna's libido is not only shown to be a narcissistic and destructive form of insanity, but a manifestation of the competitive social relations encouraged by that economic system. His actions put at risk not only his friend, the village community and core cultural values, but also the social contract between labour and capital and the road to national progress predicated on a pace of modernization that allows for gradual social adjustment. Krishna's return to reason and his readmission into the village community and the national project of Nehruvian socialism occur after he relinquishes his dangerous libidinal claims.

 4. Raj Kapoor is clearly a versatile actor with an admirable performative range. Where in Aah he plays the tragic son of a powerful industrialist, in Awara he appears as a vagabond on the periphery of normative social relations. The masculine features are recognizably less soft and more robust in the second film, but the corporeal style remains very much within the ambit of the ideological as manifested in debates about wealth and penury, legitimacy and illegitimacy. Kapoor's body language, alternating between instructive clowning and reasoned aggression, is an integral part of the plot which takes up the issue of existential destiny. Is individual fate the outcome of genetic predisposition or social determinism? The film makes the point that the malfeasance of the lumpenproletariat is a by-product of inflexible class relations established by bourgeois society. It may even comprise an unlawful mirror-image, as Raj reminds Rita, of the legalized social relations of capitalism. Legitimacy, in other words, is obtained through the calculated exercise of institutionalized, class-based power. Vagabondage manifests itself as an effect of biopolitics that determines which subject is incorporated into or ostracized from legitimate social relations.

 5. In Jeevan Jyoti, in which he plays the part of a widower kept awake by recollections of his dead spouse, bodily gestures and movements serve to underscore the protagonist's helplessness in the face of adversity. Large segments of the film consist of therapeutic flashbacks in which the insomniac, Shyam Sundar, narrates to a physician the tale of his foredoomed marriage. When we first encounter the protagonist, he is scarcely more than a ghost: thin, wan and emaciated. Unable to cope with his wife's loss and the memory of her relentless persecution at the hands of his kinsfolk, Shyam Sundar finds no rest.

 6. Tumsa Nahin Dekha ranked fifth at the box office and took a net profit of Rs 10,000,000; Dil Deke Dekho ranked sixth and drew a net profit of Rs 8,000,000; Ujala is not listed in the top-earners at the box office. See http://www.boxofficeindia.com/showProd.php?itemCat = 165&catName = MTk1OQ = = .

 7. Sigmund Freud distinguishes the internalized individual superego from ‘the super-ego of a cultural epoch’ which ‘rests upon the impression left behind by the personalities of great leaders, people who were endowed with immense spiritual or intellectual power or in whom some human striving found its strongest and purest, and hence often one-sided, expression’ (Freud 2010, 78).

 8. The love-object is the figure of sublimation precisely because it stands in for but cannot take the place of the impossible figure of desire, the lady-thing, the real.

 9. See ‘Shammi Kapoor: The Original Yahoo Man’ at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6203237.stm.

10. Freud defines sublimation as the capacity to redirect the sex drive into non-sexual activities and objects without the loss of the original psycho-sexual intensity (Freud 2010, 90).

11. See http://www.boxofficeindia.com/showProd.php?itemCat = 168&catName = MTk2Mg = = .

12. A clay pot containing buttermilk, the matki is hung high above the ground. Makti-raiders form a human pyramid around the matki to enable their leader to reach the sacred pot.

13. Water is thrown on the makti raiders to obstruct them from their goal; it is possible that cow urine was used to achieve the same effect in antiquity and led to the sudden rediscovery of repressed olfactory powers.